What do you think?
Rate this book
Winners & Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from the Vietnam War
The National Book Award–winning classic on the Vietnam War, reissued for the war’s fiftieth anniversary.
Based on interviews with both Americans and Vietnamese, Winners and Losers is Gloria Emerson s powerful portrait of the Vietnam War. From soldiers on the battlefield to protesters on the home front, Emerson chronicles the war s impact on ordinary lives with characteristic insight and brilliance. Today, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, much of the physical and emotional damage from that conflict the empty political rhetoric, the mounting casualties, and the troubled homecomings of shell-shocked soldiers is once again part of the American experience. Winners and Losers remains a potent reminder of the danger of blindly applied American power, and its poignant truths are the legacy of a remarkable journalist."
Based on interviews with both Americans and Vietnamese, Winners and Losers is Gloria Emerson s powerful portrait of the Vietnam War. From soldiers on the battlefield to protesters on the home front, Emerson chronicles the war s impact on ordinary lives with characteristic insight and brilliance. Today, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, much of the physical and emotional damage from that conflict the empty political rhetoric, the mounting casualties, and the troubled homecomings of shell-shocked soldiers is once again part of the American experience. Winners and Losers remains a potent reminder of the danger of blindly applied American power, and its poignant truths are the legacy of a remarkable journalist."
608 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
7 people are currently reading
468 people want to read
About the author
Gloria Emerson
12 booksGloria Emerson was an American author, journalist and New York Times war correspondent. Emerson received the 1978 National Book Award in Contemporary Thought for Winners and Losers, her book about the Vietnam War. She wrote four books, in addition to articles for Esquire, Harper's, Vogue, Playboy, Saturday Review and Rolling Stone.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
August 18, 2018
This book is about the Vietnam War and how it affected life in the United States in the 1970’s. It is a work of outstanding journalism. We get in depth portraits of very different people and how their lives were changed by Vietnam. This is not a book examining high level decisions taken in Washington or Saigon. It is about “normal people” whose lives were altered and seared forever. There is a wide range – parents’ whose sons’ died, wives who became widows, men who lost limbs, men who deserted, mother’s of slain soldiers who joined the anti-war movement, a North Vietnamese soldier who was captured, and U.S. POW’s.
We come away with insights of the era – of how people lived and reacted to war. We experience an America that was much divided – an angry America. There were those who believed in their government and military and felt for example that draft dodgers should be executed. There were those who detested the Vietnamese, who saw them as being ungrateful or worse. Others turned against their government in different ways. It split families and neighbors. If your son fled to Canada you would be ostracized in your community, as your son was now a traitor. Those who publicly protested the war had their patriotism questioned and were often physically assaulted.
The author spent time in Vietnam (from 1970 – 72) and we get a perspective from inside the war zones. She spoke to political prisoners, some of whom were held in small “tiger cages” with no room to stand in. She makes no qualms of her opposition to the war and U.S. participation in it – and can be quite sardonic in outlook. The South Vietnamese government, supported and propped up by the U.S., was corrupt and undemocratic, political opposition was not tolerated.
Many in the U.S. (veterans included) felt that the troops were hamstrung and were “prevented” from winning – that the war could have been pursued more vigorously. This overlooks the fact that more bomb tonnage was dropped in North Vietnam than during World War II, that the Vietnamese landscape was defoliated and poisoned by Agent Orange, napalm, land mines... What good did any of this do for the Vietnamese people?
The author is a very astute observer, listener, and chronicler of the time period. This resonates throughout the book with its many varied accounts of lives from cities to small towns. We now live in an era where journalists and journalism are being denigrated, more so in the United States by the current government. This is a powerful book amply illustrating why we need viable reporting on controversial issues.
We come away with insights of the era – of how people lived and reacted to war. We experience an America that was much divided – an angry America. There were those who believed in their government and military and felt for example that draft dodgers should be executed. There were those who detested the Vietnamese, who saw them as being ungrateful or worse. Others turned against their government in different ways. It split families and neighbors. If your son fled to Canada you would be ostracized in your community, as your son was now a traitor. Those who publicly protested the war had their patriotism questioned and were often physically assaulted.
The author spent time in Vietnam (from 1970 – 72) and we get a perspective from inside the war zones. She spoke to political prisoners, some of whom were held in small “tiger cages” with no room to stand in. She makes no qualms of her opposition to the war and U.S. participation in it – and can be quite sardonic in outlook. The South Vietnamese government, supported and propped up by the U.S., was corrupt and undemocratic, political opposition was not tolerated.
Many in the U.S. (veterans included) felt that the troops were hamstrung and were “prevented” from winning – that the war could have been pursued more vigorously. This overlooks the fact that more bomb tonnage was dropped in North Vietnam than during World War II, that the Vietnamese landscape was defoliated and poisoned by Agent Orange, napalm, land mines... What good did any of this do for the Vietnamese people?
The author is a very astute observer, listener, and chronicler of the time period. This resonates throughout the book with its many varied accounts of lives from cities to small towns. We now live in an era where journalists and journalism are being denigrated, more so in the United States by the current government. This is a powerful book amply illustrating why we need viable reporting on controversial issues.
December 7, 2021
"I just want someone to say they're sorry! That's all. "We're sorry. But no one has" An American veteran of Viet Nam speaking to journalist Gloria Emerson. Emerson, who covered the war for the NEW YORK TIMES and became one of the first to denounce this barbarism, here gathers testimony from American and Vietnamese survivors who want the war to mean something to their lives and to the world. Heartbreaking. BTW, Emerson and John Lennon conducted a very bitter exchange in 1969, caught on tape and available on YouTube, on how to best protest the war. She called his "bag-ins" and "acorns for peace" campaign not only ridiculous but harmful to the anti-war movement. John responded, "I can write a boring anti-war manifesto only intellectuals will read or I can compose 'Give Peace a Chance'". I think both were right.
February 22, 2016
"I think that writing about war is a way of raising the dead and hoping you will see them again," Gloria Emerson said toward the end of her life. She'd come to feel that nothing she published in forty years of covering conflicts in Vietnam, Algeria, Nigeria, Gaza, had made the slightest bit of difference.
Winners and Losers is an angry book. But Emerson doesn't spare herself, and that's what kept me reading. American journalists, she said at one point, "were not unlike a great flock of gulls skimming over the corpses and offal of the war, plunging into it, and coming up again." Looking back over her years covering the war, she is most troubled by the fate of her Vietnamese sources. "Few of us who were there can claim innocence," she wrote in regard to Luong, her translator, whom she used for her own advancement and gain and comfort.
"Experts," the essay in which the story of Luong is related, along with those of other old Vietnam hands like Emerson herself, ends where it began, with a statement on the futility of "reciting the horror and the pain and the waste of the war." Not only is it pointless, she suggests, it is dangerous: "It makes some men more interested, even willing to prove that they are ready for risks like that."
Americans cannot perceive - even the most decent among us - the suffering caused by the United States air war in Indochina, and how huge are the graveyards we have created there. To a reporter recently returned from Vietnam, it often seems that much of our fury and fear is reserved for busing, abortion, mugging and liberation of some kind. Our deepest emotions are wired to baseball players.Emerson had worked as a freelance journalist in Saigon in the mid 1950s, when it appeared to her, even after the French war, as "a soft, plump, clean place of greens and yellows." Returning some fourteen years later, at the height of the American war, the first thing she noticed was that all the trees were gone, chopped down to widen the boulevards, to allow for the movement of armored vehicles. She wrote articles for the New York Times about the war and the people, and they are filled with bitterness.
Winners and Losers is an angry book. But Emerson doesn't spare herself, and that's what kept me reading. American journalists, she said at one point, "were not unlike a great flock of gulls skimming over the corpses and offal of the war, plunging into it, and coming up again." Looking back over her years covering the war, she is most troubled by the fate of her Vietnamese sources. "Few of us who were there can claim innocence," she wrote in regard to Luong, her translator, whom she used for her own advancement and gain and comfort.
Sometimes it seemed that Luong was changing--yet not changing--and I worried how he might be affected by working for Americans. Yet I never worried so much that I let him go.After the war, when she was safely back in the U.S., Emerson tried to find out what had happened to Luong, but she had no address for him. She hadn't thought she'd need one, since he'd always received his mail at the Saigon office of the Times.
"Experts," the essay in which the story of Luong is related, along with those of other old Vietnam hands like Emerson herself, ends where it began, with a statement on the futility of "reciting the horror and the pain and the waste of the war." Not only is it pointless, she suggests, it is dangerous: "It makes some men more interested, even willing to prove that they are ready for risks like that."
May 18, 2012
Oral histories from the Vietnam War. She covers the gamut of people both for and against the War including Vietnamese. Gut wrenching and heart breaking but well worth the effort.
October 29, 2018
There needs to be a book on the author...read Frances Fitzgerald's preface to see why Gloria Emerson rates the honour. This is an amazing work that I happened upon. Having read many histories of the Vietnam War, I had never heard of Winners & Losers. However, if you are looking to better understand the conflict in its totality and with more time for better perspective, look elsewhere. The author was a journalist who covered the war but her book is a narrative history and was written while the war still raged (the 2014 reprint is a must).
Do not get me wrong, it is fantastic. The interviewees provide the human aspect to this dark piece of history. However, the book's structure and style may confuse those not yet acquainted with the conflict's broad strokes and chronology. By all means, read this book but first check out Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975 by Sir Max Hastings or The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (the television series works too) or Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History.
There has been so much said about the belligerents being committed to the war. Common thinking says, the North Vietnamese were in it to win it. In reading Emerson's book and having digested the Ken Burns documentary, the South Vietnamese get short shrift. To be sure, most of their military were opportunistic and incompetent. It is the few, that fought hard and to the end, that impress. America's military-industrial complex was certainly committed to the war when the rank and file were not (The 1972 Christmas bombings cost $25,000,000 a day!).
BTW - The Defense Department reported that the overall cost of the Vietnam war was $173 billion (equivalent to over a trillion in 2018). Veteran's benefits and interest would add another $250 billion ($1.6 Trillion in 2018 dollars). But, of course, it is not about cash. It is about whether the conflict served any real purpose and whether it was worth well over a million lives.
Do not get me wrong, it is fantastic. The interviewees provide the human aspect to this dark piece of history. However, the book's structure and style may confuse those not yet acquainted with the conflict's broad strokes and chronology. By all means, read this book but first check out Vietnam: An Epic History of a Divisive War 1945-1975 by Sir Max Hastings or The Vietnam War: An Intimate History by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns (the television series works too) or Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History.
There has been so much said about the belligerents being committed to the war. Common thinking says, the North Vietnamese were in it to win it. In reading Emerson's book and having digested the Ken Burns documentary, the South Vietnamese get short shrift. To be sure, most of their military were opportunistic and incompetent. It is the few, that fought hard and to the end, that impress. America's military-industrial complex was certainly committed to the war when the rank and file were not (The 1972 Christmas bombings cost $25,000,000 a day!).
BTW - The Defense Department reported that the overall cost of the Vietnam war was $173 billion (equivalent to over a trillion in 2018). Veteran's benefits and interest would add another $250 billion ($1.6 Trillion in 2018 dollars). But, of course, it is not about cash. It is about whether the conflict served any real purpose and whether it was worth well over a million lives.
April 30, 2021
This was a really interesting book on Vietnam, and it wasn't at all what I was expecting. Instead of explaining the history of Vietnam, Emerson hops through the years of Vietnam through the perspectives of just about everyone, from American soldiers, Vietnamese villagers, North and South Vietnamese soldiers, American families, journalists, and more. The war in Vietnam was before my time, and I've always been taught that it was a terrible war, but this book made it much more personal for me. Reading about the gore of battle and grieving families was the hardest part, and I felt very empathetic towards all those who have suffered because of the war. While this book is meant to take a stand against the war and the United States' involvement in Vietnam, Emerson does a phenomenal job of blending the different perspectives and opinions on the war throughout this book. It was published in 1976, so the whole vibe of the book felt like the reader was in the middle of a heated, personal debate on the war. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to study Vietnam through the eyes of the people who were there and who were affected by it. Learning about the history is one thing, but reading the perspectives of those who were there felt much more enriching.
June 27, 2020
A valuable source of information on the war's actual effects on people's lives, both pro and against the war, even though with a degree of bias that the author never denied or hid. Nevertheless, the reader must already have a basic knowledge of the war's history, the dates, the places (the vast photographic material available will be of great help) and then start the book, for the author obviously took for granted that her readers would be acquainted with the events on which the personal stories are based.
December 3, 2018
Nice anecdotal stories from war veterans. Unique stories from US towns affected by the war.
Read
August 2, 2023This is told from the point of view of soldiers and family members on the American and Vietnamese side. A different look at this war, and a great book. Shoutout to Gloria for writing this RIP
December 4, 2015
Near the end of Winners & Losers, Emerson describes the impact of the Vietnam war on those who resisted the socially sanctioned urge to blot it out of their consciousness as "a longer and terrible grieving." That's a perfect summary of the emotional center of the book, built around Emerson's interviews with a broad range of Americans and Vietnamese, most of them conducted during the first part of the 1970s. Emerson was one of the very best journalists who spent time in Vietnam. She wrote with great precision and clarity, refusing to accept the cant, evasions and outright lies circulated by the brass and politicians, listening carefully to the soldiers, and paying attention to the Vietnamese. I'd put her beside John Laurence, Neil Sheehan, Michael Herr and a few others, in the first rank of Vietnam journalists.
Winners & Losers includes the voices of both supporters and opponents of the war, but it's clear message is that the war was a bad idea carried out horrendously. It's disturbing how many of the patterns she identified decades ago remain so immediately recognizable.
Winners & Losers includes the voices of both supporters and opponents of the war, but it's clear message is that the war was a bad idea carried out horrendously. It's disturbing how many of the patterns she identified decades ago remain so immediately recognizable.
August 22, 2016
I find it hard to sympathize with the victims while the author somehow forgot to mention that THE WHOLE GODDAMNED WAR HAPPENED BECAUSE OF THEIR FRACKING GOVERNMENT!!!!
that said, mediocre book at best
that said, mediocre book at best
April 9, 2011
Fantastic war reporting.
April 20, 2017
This book was published some 41 years ago, and truthfully some if the material in the book does seem dated. However, for anyone that lived through this period and experienced firsthand what many of the interviews and essays cover, it is still interesting.
As a former Vietnam era Marine Corps veteran I am still trying to understand all that took place and
why I feel some of the things about this period as I do.
Ms. Emerson makes some good points about the misleading of the american public and as well the misuse of the american troops in this war.
It is ironic (in some ways) to see that the politicians who embraced the war the way they did and even when the errors of their choices were made notable in the historical sense have been repeated with what has taken place in the middle-east for the last 15 years or so.
When will we learn?
As a former Vietnam era Marine Corps veteran I am still trying to understand all that took place and
why I feel some of the things about this period as I do.
Ms. Emerson makes some good points about the misleading of the american public and as well the misuse of the american troops in this war.
It is ironic (in some ways) to see that the politicians who embraced the war the way they did and even when the errors of their choices were made notable in the historical sense have been repeated with what has taken place in the middle-east for the last 15 years or so.
When will we learn?
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews